On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 04:21:41PM -0400, Christopher Browne via talk wrote:
Bacula has always seemed to be one of the good options out there, and running it on FreeNAS is certainly well supported.
There's nothing obviously wrong with your approach to rsync to a remote place or copy to external HDD for rotation.
Madison Kelly did a talk on something akin back in 2004; Madison was the first person I heard that particularly "championed" using USB-connected HDDs as a backup medium at the time that tape drives were only just starting to get supplanted as a backup medium.
Since then, that direction has become somewhere in between "viable" and "preferable." And it now looks like tape drives are pretty rarely used anymore, as rarity has made it difficult for vendors to boost capacity as quickly as is the case for disk drives. *Everyone* wants bigger HDDs. (Well, we're starting to glimpse a place where solid state drives are getting sufficiently large and cheap that a lot of computer systems now prefer SSD, and we may see HDDs go somewhat down the road that tape drives have...)
Rotating the HDDs so that they do get spun up fairly regularly is a good idea.
My experience some years ago with 3 USB harddrives that were rotated weekly was that the disks didn't last long. 3.5" HDs do not like being moved a lot and frequently died. Moving to tape was way way more reliable but certainly had a higher cost in terms of getting a tape drive and for recovery you might need another tape drive while a USB drive works with anything. If your backup is pretty small though, USB attached SSD seems like it could be a very reliable solution. -- Len Sorensen